SocketPlane was founded by former Cisco, Red Hat, HP, OpenDaylight and Dell officials. In the open source world, their names are well known: Madhu Venugopal, John Willis, Brent Salisbury and Dave Tucker.

The team is looking to bring enterprise-grade networking to the Docker ecosystem by developing a native networking stack called SocketPlane -- for Docker software. The SocketPlane software will be designed to address the performance, availability and scale requirements of networking in large, container-based cloud deployments.

The software will employ a DevOps model and tools to enable scale, programmable agility, and policy-driven automation, SocketPlane officials say. It will also provide network virtualization to mask network configuration complexity, they say.

The SocketPlane team calls their strategy DevOps-defined networking. No other vendor offering SDN products has adopted this model, company officials claim, but Google, Facebook and Twitter have done so internally.

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